Connecting to the Future at the Mobile World Congress 2016

On 27 February – 2 March, DataArt exhibited with Canonical at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. More than 2,000 exhibitors and 100,000 attendees gathered in an arena bursting with networking opportunities to present and absorb the latest technological developments and next generation services of the mobile industry.

The big trends this year were the Internet of Things, Big Data, Cloud, VR and 5G. Almost every booth had an IoT demo stand. Cars, refrigerators, smart home solutions, low energy sensors, and the list goes on. Overcrowding of IoT booths made it evident that this year IoT is finally reaching the end users. Notably, the cloud technology becomes the new IoT standard. Almost every IoT solution enables your device data to be sent straight to the cloud. Why? Because from that point you can do whatever you want with your solution: scale it, use big data, do machine learning, etc. The sky’s the limit.

But does it mean the main IoT problems are already solved? Security? Device management? Low-energy devices sending data? The answer is still “no” somehow, unfortunately. Most exhibitors avoid talking about security. Proprietary solutions they show are about cloud and comfortable UX, not about managing networks of devices. I’m glad to say that finally there were prototypes of low-energy long-distance devices and protocols, but we are yet to see their performance in real life.

DataArt demoed enterprise predictive maintenance. How did it differ from all other demos? When we build our solutions, we do our best to address all the abovementioned issues. And we bring top open-source cutting edge technologies to the table, which evolve faster and more organically than proprietary ones.

The exhibiting halls were swirling, the rhythm was crazy, business cards exchanged in the blink of an eye. Companies did all sorts of tricks to get attention: dancers, robots, flashing lights, lotteries, promoters, free food, parties after exhibiting hours. We know it was business, but it felt like a party.